It's a line he's used many times before as land program director of the nonprofit Save Mount Diablo preservation group. And soon, he will be able to stop using the words "should be."

The 165-acre spread where Adams was standing last week, formerly known as the Viera family ranchland, has been bought by Save Mount Diablo so it can be turned over to the state parks system - which, ironically, is considering shutting Mount Diablo State Park and many others to stem the California budget's tide of red ink.

Long-coveted land

The land on the southeastern slopes of North Peak had been on Save Mount Diablo's top 10 desire list since the Walnut Creek group was founded 38 years ago - and with 50 rare plant species and an unusually diverse landscape of brush, trees and creeks, it is living up to that desire.

The Viera land, Adams said, holds what may be the greatest concentration of native plants in the Bay Area. And now that Save Mount Diablo's $975,000 purchase is final - as of Wednesday - there is no chance that, like many other parts of the Bay Area's second-highest mountain, those plants will be plowed under to make way for spacious ranchettes. About half of the 3,849-foot-high mountain in Contra Costa County, 20,000 acres, remains in private hands.

Save Mount Diablo hopes to turn the Viera land over to the state sometime in the next few years, when private, nonprofit or state funding can be found to reimburse the organization. In the meantime, the group will maintain the land as open space.

The property climbs across a 2-mile-long mixture of chamise brush and oak-pine woodland, from the 1,000-foot-elevation Perkins Canyon to a 2,300-foot-high grass patch just below North Peak, the lower of the mountain's two loftiest points. The view on a clear day stretches all the way to the Sierra.

Rare creatures, plants

Three branches of Perkins Creek run through the land, and the astonishing number of rare plants includes the yellow Brewer's dwarf flax and the Mount Diablo jewel flower, a purple bloom found only on Mount Diablo.

Also making the Viera parcel home are feral pigs, mountain lions, red-tailed hawks and the Alameda whipsnake, a threatened species that slithers across the top of bushes, rather than beneath them, as it peers around for prey.

"You'll find one or two Mount Diablo jewel flowers at a time on the other side of the mountain, but on this property, we've seen hundreds," Adams said during last week's hike to acquaint Save Mount Diablo leaders and reporters with the new acquisition. "This property is a complicated and dramatically diverse habitat."

Save Mount Diablo's leaders had been trying to get the Viera property designated as parkland since even before the nonprofit's existence. Co-founder Mary Bowerman, who died in 2005, hiked its deer trails in search of rare flowers since the 1930s and pleaded with the family to sell for decades.

Matriarch Lucy Viera died in 2002, "and we just decided the land might as well do someone else some good now," said her daughter Barbara Perley of Sonora. The family had owned the parcel for 105 years.

Waiting out hard times

Ron Brown, executive director of Save Mount Diablo, said he took particular pleasure in acquiring the land since it comes at a time that the crippling state budget deficit is threatening to close Mount Diablo State Park.

Acquisitions of new state parkland have been frozen for about a year, he noted, and with the budget crisis showing no letup, the only progress toward preserving parkland will be through organizations such as his, Brown said.

"We find that sometimes we just have to wait it out - people's priorities change, things like falling property values come and then we get our chance," Brown said. "We were finally in the right place at the right time on this one.

"It's a very good thing we got it, because it still had the potential to become an estate home."